


Here In This Lonely Place

by Brighid



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-03
Updated: 2012-08-03
Packaged: 2017-11-11 07:55:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/476298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brighid/pseuds/Brighid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney has always been stupid in love with John.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here In This Lonely Place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Destina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destina/gifts).



> For 'zoot, Destina and Salieri. Based at the end of season three, got Jossed.

Here In This Lonely Place

 

The sound of Asuran 'bots clattering behind them spurred John to run faster, even though his lungs were burning and he was pretty sure he'd sprung something in his knee a kilometre back. The 'bots were just the vanguard; the Asuran Gateskimmer wouldn't be far behind. Ahead he could hear the whine and whoosh of the gate activating. "C'mon, Rodney," he gasped, pulling his arm harder, forcing him to keep up. Rodney didn't have breath to speak, just gasped painfully and somehow, from somewhere, pulled out a last burst of speed. Ronon was already laying pulse cover fire, but it would be only a few more blasts until they'd recoded themselves. He saw Teyla key in the IDC, heard Atlantis' confirmation as they surged up the steps, half-falling.

"We're coming in hot and buggy," he said even as Teyla dove into the gate. 

"We have containment protocols in place." Elizabeth's voice was thin, strained. Too many times, too damned many times in the last few months. They were all frazzled. He shoved Rodney through with his left hand, firing the alternating frequency blast from his own wrist-bracer. "Go, I'm right behind you," John said, scattering 'bots to inactive cells. 

He turned only when Ronon was through, and then he saw the Gateskimmer, bigger and badder than anything they'd seen so far and pulsing blue-white right at him. John dove into the gate, and the split-second transition was cold, then searing pain, then nothing at all.

)0(

The smell was wrong. Off. Darker and deeper somehow. John shifted, felt the pull of restraints. Opened his eyes. Infirmary, but low lit, and still smelling wrong, still smelling like ...

"Wraith!" John tried to pull the restraints free, heaved up his body and twisted and arched and then a hand pushed him down, held him flat to the bed.

"Colonel," and it was Rodney bending over him, blocking his line of sight to the Wraith drone standing at the door. "John. What's the last thing you remember? Tell me."

"Fuck you," John said and Rodney closed his eyes, swallowed, opened them again. The look he gave John was pretty typically Rodney: a mixture of annoyance, fondness and sorrow.

The sorrow seemed the deepest, though.

"Colonel. John," and he touched John, his fingers cool and calloused. "Oh God. I missed you so damn much," he said. "This is Atlantis, Colonel. Your last memory was diving through the gate on P4Y-190, right? Under siege by an Asuran Gateskimmer? And when you went through it felt ... wrong?"

John twisted his head to look around. Christ. Wraith. Asuran 'bots. A handful of humans, and few of them from Earth, by the looks of things. Probably some of them human-form Asurans. "If by wrong you mean like having my insides pulled through my nose, then yeah, wrong," John agreed. One Wraith drone, and it didn't look like anyone else was carrying, but that meant nothing with Asurans. "So. When do I get the red pill?"

Rodney blinked, then snorted. "This is the red pill version, Colonel. The thing is, it's been nine years, John. The energy weapon the Asurans used ... it caused the wormhole to not only move through space but time." He reached out, touched John's shoulder. "It's been ... a bad nine years John. The Ori forces have all but won back home, and they've made serious incursions here. Atlantis is pretty much the last major resistance standing, and we're just barely hanging on."

"Since when did we include them as part of Atlantis?" John asked, jerking his head. 

Rodney looked up. "The Wraith won Atlantis six years ago, John. They kept those with the ATA gene to interface with the equipment. They ... " he trailed off, made a helpless gesture. "But by then we'd already been cut off from Earth, because of the Ori. That's why they didn't try to go there. They can fight corporeal Lanteans just fine, but their ascended evil twins? Not so much. So they opted to stay here, start building up their defences against the growing Asuran presence. Only when the Ori started showing up, the Asurans came to the Wraith and they made a treaty. Wraith strength, Asuran technology."

"Then why are you still alive? Sounds like everybody became pretty damn redundant at that point." John pulled experimentally at the restraints again because he couldn't just lie there and not try. He noticed the dark swirl of a tattoo just under Rodney's collar, and his stomach rolled unpleasantly.

"Atlantis doesn't like the Asurans much, not after Freydis reprogrammed her after the first time. She recognizes them as an enemy, and locks them out whenever possible. They'd have to take the city right apart and rebuild it from scratch. Mostly they stay and work in the sister city, Sura, but they've started a next generation, a biological/machine hybrid that can bypass the Asgard-Alteran protocols and work with Atlantis. Resources are limited, though, and they haven't got enough to get rid of us all yet."

"So you're prisoners, really," John said.

"Yes," Rodney said, somewhat testily. "Gilded cage, death outside the door but still, prisoners. I had noticed. But all things considered? It's still the best chance we've got to avoid being under the thumb of the Ori."

"Teyla?" John asked. Ronon. Elizabeth. None of them had been gene carriers. None of them had anything the Wraith would have needed. Rodney met his gaze steadily, shook his head slowly. John closed his eyes. "I changed my mind. Give me the goddamn blue pill."

Rodney touched his shoulder, held it gently. "Not an option. Believe me. I tried." His voice was so tired that John wanted to sink under the weight of it. 

He wondered if Rodney already had.

)0(

Everything was the same, but jarringly different at the same time. Low lights, slightly reddish and more suited to Wraith eyes leant a subtle shadow to the control room; everything looked dark and smeared in it, somehow unclean. It smelled wet and musty beneath the recycled air. Only Rodney's gentle hand on his shoulder kept him on the stairs and going up. Inside Elizabeth's office little had changed except for the removal of personal effects. Still, the same desk and chair were there, and the Wraith Queen sitting behind the desk looked as tired and tight-strung as Elizabeth had the last time he'd seen her. He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood.

"Love what you've done with the place," John said.

She looked up at him, and her inner eyelids blinked sideways, briefly. "Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard," she said, her voice rich and deep as graveyard dirt. "I am Ne'Ur. That is ... as close to a name as our kind would have." She stood, crossed the room, tall and thin in fitted dark pants and sleeveless shirt that were embroidered with the same design tattooed along her arms and throat. Her cobalt hair was a mass of braids coiled about her head like a crown. "Your expression of the ATA gene sequence is truly remarkable. Most of your kind have only the main sequence active. In you, they almost all are. You will be a remarkable asset to our battle against the Ori, and leverage against the Asurans." She touched his neck. "You will be marked as our Hive, and as bound to me. This will give you protection, and it will give you freedom." She reached back, took a small, flat device, then grabbed his jaw and twisted his head to expose his throat more fully. It touched him and he heard the hiss of compressed air, felt a sharp stinging and then she let him go, stepping back and away in one boneless glide. He forced himself not to reach up and rub at the mark he knew was staining his skin.

"Fuck you," John said. 

She smiled at that, her teeth sharp and wet. "These times are what they are; what tomorrow offers I cannot say. When I consumed the Myn Queen who held Atlantis first, it was because she had lived too many centuries to understand that adaptation was necessary." Ne'Ur shrugged, a borrowed gesture that looked wrong on her narrow body. "I suspect adaptation will continue to be necessary. It has begun already in the eggs, and the laws." She shrugged again. "Our hive includes the h'mans who survived Myn'Ur. You are ours as all the Greater and the Lesser of the hive, but not as cattle, nor as slaves." She touched his throat lightly, and he felt the prickle of her hooks, felt the subtle searching of them. "I cannot say the same for all the hives, what few remain after the Ori." She turned, looked at Rodney. "Feed him. Take him to the chair, see how he integrates with the sensors. Hopefully his genetics allow him to access deeper and longer than the others."

"I will pull him out if I suspect he's in danger," Rodney said, his voice gone hard and edged. "I'm in charge of that now, not your Arul. Remind them of that."

Ne'Ur regarded Rodney steadily, coming in close to his personal space, but he didn't flinch, barely even looked at her. Her facial flares opened, fluttered, and her inner eyelid blinked, then the outer. She nodded. "Of course, Myn'McKay." She touched the tattoo along his throat, one that did not match her own. She glanced over at John. "He wears Myn'Ur's mark still, to remember always that we are enemies. Did you teach him that?"

John glanced at the fierce twist of Rodney's slanted mouth, the way the edges of his lips were white. "No. He's always been a stubborn bastard," John said at last. He turned, walked to the door, Rodney right behind him.

He waited until they are several corridors away to duck into a wall niche and stop, touch his throat and scrub at the skin. "Fuck, fuck, fuck," and he was breathing too fast and too hard and his throat was tight. At last Rodney pulled his fingers away from the bruising skin, covering the mark with his hand, cupping John's shoulder with the other.

"I know, Christ, I know," he said, finally, brokenly. "It's been ... a long nine years."

John touched Rodney's head, the slight thinning at the crown, the thick soft hair at the nape. "Jesus, Rodney," and his eyes were dry and burning with despair. 

"Come on. We'll eat, and then I'll take you to the chair room. Maybe we'll be able to make this damn thing work. The Ori ships are on their way here," Rodney said. "We have about two weeks, at most."

"And then?" John said.

"At the risk of being called a pessimist," Rodney said wryly, "we probably die." He took them to the transporter, set a co-ordinate high in one of the towers they hadn't yet explored before ... John's hands curled into fists.

The quarters Rodney led him to were larger than his old ones: a bedroom, partly screened, a sitting area, a dining bar and something that resembled a kitchenette. Rodney went into a silvery box under one of the counters, pulled out bread, cold meat, a hunk of cheese and a pitcher of water. "We get our rations, once a week, since we humans have to eat more often than the once-a-day mess opening. What we get depends on how well we work. This is true of Wraith and humans alike," Rodney said conversationally. "Needless to say, I've usually got food in the fridge." John sat on a stool at the counter and wordlessly took the sandwich Rodney made and passed to him. Rodney made a second one, ate it in three bites, then put the fixings away. "The food storage is incredible, something we'd only just started to tinker with back on Earth. They use sonic fields to keep the food fresh." He puttered around the kitchen, wiping the counter, touching things randomly. "D'you want clothes that aren't medical scrubs?" He kept his eyes on the counter.

"That'd be nice," John said slowly, and Rodney bustled over to the screened section, came back holding grey pants and a grey smock shirt, much like he was wearing. Once John had taken them Rodney opened his half-closed fist, and offered what rested in his palm to John without looking at him. 

A black wristband. 

"These should fit," Rodney said hurriedly, brushing past him into the washroom. John thumbed his clothes, then pulled the wristband over his bare wrist. For him it had been a few hours, but for Rodney it had been nine years. Something almost like rage surged in him, and then something smaller, frailer flared in its wake. Something that made him swallow hard. He heard Rodney pissing and fussing around while he changed, and suddenly realized the rush of water was going on way too long.

Inside the small room it was warm and moist and the water sounded loud. Rodney turned, reached out and pulled John to him, burying his face in the side of his neck, and John went stiff and awkward, because sure, they'd ... but not now, not here. "Hey, I..."

"Shut up," Rodney snapped, still clutching him close. His breath was hot and moist on John's neck, in his ear. "They monitor everything," Rodney said, his voice not even a whisper. "This is the only way," and he touched John's neck, ran hot, hard hands over his back. "We have got to get you back," Rodney said. "Even if we survive the Ori, the Asurans have huge forces hidden. We're fucked whatever way this goes," he said brokenly, and John found himself pulling Rodney closer, holding him, feeling the slight tremor of his body. 

"Tell me," he sighed against the skin of Rodney's neck, but Rodney just shook his head, pulled away. 

"Later," he said. He leaned in again, touched John's shoulder briefly, ran his hand up over the tattoo. "I'm sorry," he said, then turned and left John alone in the room.

John very deliberately did not touch the mark of Ne'Ur. Instead he pictured the imprint of Rodney's big palm over top, obscuring it, making it nothing. It helped, a little.

)0(

"Ne'Hkt'umae," Rodney said, indicating the dark robed Wraith sitting and monitoring the progress of the human currently strapped into the chair. She was, John saw, a young female and too thin, stripped to bone and sinew. "One of the Lesser Arul, First of the Ancient Sciences." The Wraith stood and bowed to them. His pale hair was caught back in an elaborate braid and his ears were pierced several times. He smiled at John and the expression was far less shark-like than the other Wraith John had encountered. 

"Greetings, Ne'Sheppard. Ne'Mios is tiring quickly, and so we become vulnerable. It is hoped that your greater facility will allow us deep searching, and perhaps access to the Hidden here, the secret of the Unbecoming."

"He means," Rodney said, "that they still think there's an Ancient weapon against the Ori hidden here."

"I believe I said that," Ne'Hkt'umae said mildly. "And you may call me Umae, since you h'mans mangle our words." He stood and went over to the chair, releasing the girl from the restraints and helping her sit. "You should go eat, little one," he said. "You've earned your meat and bread." He turned back to them. "Please sit in the chair, so we can take calibration readings."

"Since when are Wraith nice to humans?" John asked.

Umae blinked, first the inner and then the outer. "Ah. I am the First Hatching After, and fed to growth quickly. Ne'Ur made me to be ... more like you, to work with you. H'mans do not work efficiently when terrified." 

"How very ... brave new world of her," John said finally. "So, calibration readings? Apparently some things cross all species, huh, Rodney?"

Rodney snorted. "Lay down and think of the solar system, Colonel," he said, and John did.

It was like slipping into warm water, feeling Atlantis come alive around him, inside him. Something inside uncurled, reached, was met and he dove deep into the blue of her, touching all her secrets, coaxing them up to daylight and ...

"Sheppard!" Rodney's voice was bright orange and sharp behind his eyes, and the flat of his palm stung when it hit John's cheek. John surfaced, opened his eyes, caught Rodney's arm before he could land a second slap. "You weren't responding," Rodney said, voice tight and fraught. "Eight hours and you got further than anyone but I thought ... " he faltered, cracked, bent his head down. "Get out of the damn chair, Colonel," he said finally.

John tried, but he was jelly-legged with fatigue. Umae was there in blink, helping him to his feet, shouldering his weight as though he were a child. "You need to eat, h'man. You have served well. You managed to activate remote sensors we had thought dead." He grinned at John, a startlingly innocent expression.

It made John's stomach curl. "Get me the hell outta here, Rodney," he said, and Rodney took him from Umae, walked him slowly out into the ruddily lit corridors. 

"I never want to see him again," John said finally, several corridors away.

"You won't." Rodney's voice was still cracked somewhere in the middle. John staggered into him, let his head loll against Rodney's shoulder.

"You think I can find a weapon, don't you?" John whispered.

"Yes," Rodney said.

"And then the Asurans will kill you all," John sighed, turning his face into Rodney's neck.

"Yes," Rodney said.

"Fuck," John sighed.

)0(

The food in the mess was plain: stew, flatbread and water. A smattering of Wraith, as loose-limbed and easy as Umae had been were scattered around the room eating stew. Two were females, though obviously not Queens, something John hadn't thought possible.

Ne'Ur had obviously been busy.

John shovelled the food in as fast as he could, feeling half-starved. Rodney ate steadily but mechanically. They finished quickly, and without any real discussion made their way back to Rodney's quarters.

John waited silently by the bathroom door while Rodney started a shower running. "You stink, Colonel," he said distinctly, loudly, but he stayed as John came into the bathroom, standing with his eyes averted while John stripped and climbed under the spray. "We have to get you home, back to your time. We have to give you the codes to break apart the Asurans, the warning signs to predict the Ori." His voice was barely audible above the hiss of water.

"Prostration would be hell on your knees," John agreed. "How the hell are we going to get me back? I don't know how the hell I got here," John said. Rodney waved his hand around irritably.

"Like I haven't been doing the math for that since the day you disappeared," Rodney said. "The energy discharged made the wormhole jump through time and space. We just have to make the right calculations and discharge the right sort of burst to make you jump back." 

"And that will take how long?" John asked.

"Less time than you'd think," Rodney said quietly. He closed his eyes briefly and the spray became a trickle. He reached in, touched John's shoulder, let his hand trail down over his wet torso, then leaned in and kissed him once, almost unbearably gently, his bright blue eyes wide open and watching. "I'm going to go to bed," he said finally.

John turned the spray off, let a blast of hot air dry him. Stood naked in the bathroom, considering, then finally turned the lights down, and went out to the bedroom. He slid beneath the sheets, curled up against Rodney's back, and was surprised when it felt like coming home.

)0(

He woke to Rodney watching him.

"What?" 

"I was in love with you. Stupid in love with you. I didn't understand that, though, until you were gone. Until I'd written walls and walls of equations trying to figure out how to prove you were still alive." Rodney stood, naked and, for the first time John could remember, utterly unselfconscious of it. He was leaner than John remembered, all angles and ridges and scars that John had never seen before. He watched as Rodney dressed, then stood and dressed himself.

He ate the bread Rodney passed him, drank the water, and they headed down to the chair. This time they were left alone, Umae slipping out with the man John was replacing in the chair. John sat down in the chair, and Rodney said, "Today, Colonel, you look for weapons with significant energy discharge. I need specs, parameters, readings. And maybe wake up the historical cortex. The Wraith don't look at history because they live through it. There might be something we can use there, or something we can bend to suit our purposes." He didn't say exactly what those purposes were.

John nodded and closed his eyes and let himself be subsumed, trusting Rodney to bring him safely back.

)0(

It was a handful of weeks before Ne'Ur called him to her again. "Ne'Hkt'Umae reports favourably of your progress, Ne'Sheppard." She looked up from the screen she was reading. "I am less convinced."

"Why don't you suck a couple of years off of me, see what you get from it?" John suggested, smiling, showing his back teeth. 

"That would impede your usefulness," she said, looking up at him, her chin resting in her hand. "Though I will, if you make it necessary." She turned her gaze back to the screen. "You have something of us in you yet; and you hate us for that as much as for anything else. You seek to be one, not one of many. But there is," she said softly, "a way to be both. And should the Asurans or the Ori triumph, you will be neither." 

"Permission to leave?" John said finally, when she said nothing else.

"Of course."

John punched the wall of Rodney's quarters as soon as the door had shut behind him. When Rodney found him later, he looked at the bruising and didn't say a word, just wrapped the knuckles in a cold, wet towel and kissed John's ear, the corner of his mouth. 

John closed his eyes and kissed him back.

)0(

John woke to Rodney's mouth pressed against his jaw. "Tomorrow," he said, and then he kissed John's mouth, hot and wet and messy. John turned in the narrow bed and took Rodney's head between his hands, took control of the kiss, sliding his tongue deep into Rodney's mouth, opening him up. Rodney made a soft, urgent noise, surged against him, hot and hard and eager and John let his legs widen, pulled Rodney over and on top of him and moaned as their bodies caught and sparked and blazed with longing.

In the middle, somewhere, John realized that he'd been a little in love with Rodney, once and now again and it made him shudder, made him surge up and clutch at everything they'd already given up as lost.

)0(

It began with a worm, crawling through Atlantis code and shutting down random systems until Ne'Ur was forced to give Rodney full access to the Atlantis network. 

Once that happened it was a small thing to set things in motion: a power cascade that would match a dial out, would send John to the Alpha Site, a little before, a little after, but close enough, just close enough.

John closed his eyes, pictured Rodney's sprawling scrawl staining the walls of the lower levels. That night, in bed, he kissed Rodney's hands slowly, finger by finger, knuckle by knuckle, traced the lines in his palms with the tip of his tongue and didn't once say why.

)0(

The morning of, Rodney sat him on the edge of the bed, kissed him once, hard, then shoved his hand into John's forehead.

Pain flared sharp and bright and brief, and then John was standing in the middle of a living room with a leather sofa, a huge plasma screen and dozens of bookshelves.

"What the fuck, Rodney!" John said, sick in his gut.

"It's not what you think, John. I'm ... the first hybrid, a mix of replicator and flesh. They broke me apart and put me back together, hoping to beat the programming but to make it work they had to leave me ... me," and Rodney was talking too fast, words spilling in panic from him as he reached out to touch John, show John but John couldn't help but flinch. 

"Jesus fucking Christ, Sheppard," Rodney snapped finally. "I'm still me, which is why I'm with the fucking Wraith, because the Asurans failed to make me what they wanted, and we don't have time for you to be an idiot about this!" He grabbed John, leaned into him, licked into his mouth and suddenly John was flooded with memories: the struggle against the Asurans (the way Elizabeth looked, broken on the floor), the Wraith (Teyla vivisected by Myn'Ur in idle curiosity), the coming of the Ori (Lorne a pillar of flame, then ash, then scattered over the steps of the gate on PX4-131) and there was so much sorrow, so much rage, and through it all a sharp, bright thread of longing ...

John pulled back with a gasp, then leaned his head forward, touched it to Rodney's. "Think you can remember all that," Rodney said and John made a noise that barely sounded human, then grabbed Rodney's face, kissed him hard enough to bruise.

"Stupid in love with you, too," John said, because it was all he had to offer him, because this Rodney, this universe wouldn't end if he went back; it didn't work that way. Somewhere a Rodney drowned, somewhere he was Rod, and here he'd die alone, in the middle of his enemies.

He was only giving John another chance, not himself.

"Let's do this," John said finally.

)0(

In the middle of a dialling protocol check Rodney stuck his sinister hand into the console, triggering quarantine shields to guard John's run to the gate, triggering the feedback loop of energy that might get John back home. 

The last thing John saw before he dove through was Rodney's body being hit by multiple pulse weapon blasts. He smiled lopsidedly at John even as he went to his knees. John closed his eyes and ran.

)0(

He dialled the address as soon as the wormhole shut down behind him. "Atlantis? This is Sheppard." He sent his code through, and then he walked through to where Lorne and his men were at the ready for him. 

Elizabeth said, "John, we thought you were ... we dialled right back out, but couldn't get a lock on the gate, and we thought ... well, we thought you were lost." She reached out, gestured at the Wraith tattoo on his neck. "Considering it's only been an hour ...I take it the debriefing will be interesting?" she said finally.

John nodded, turned and saw Rodney watching him from the dialling console, his wide blue gaze somehow worried, relieved and pissed off all at the same time. His Rodney. And not. "You could say that," John said, turning his gaze away, forcing a smile. "It's good to be home," he said quietly, and he almost meant it.

)0(

Brighid 2006


End file.
